Press agency AFP hit by cyberattack, affecting news delivery

Global news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) said that unknown hackers were able to attack its systems.

AFP, the oldest news agency in the world, said that employees detected the attack last Friday. It has affected ‘part of its delivery service to clients’.

“AFP’s technical teams are working on the incident with the support of the French National Agency for IT Systems Security (ANSSI). The relevant authorities in France have been notified,” the press agency says in a statement.

AFP is currently dealing with the incident by analyzing how this exactly happened and who’s responsible. In the meantime, AFP’s newsroom and all of its services continue to provide news coverage across the world.

In an email, which was seen by BleepingComputer, AFP warned other media companies that the attack may have compromised their FTP credentials used to receive AFP content.

“As a reminder, the passwords on your FTP servers that receive AFP content may have been compromised. Therefore, we recommend you change your passwords and check all your reception systems are secure,” the email says.

AFP was founded in 1835 in Paris, making it the oldest and most well-known news agency in the world. The company has a presence in 150 countries, employing over 2,400 people of 100 nationalities, including 1,700 local journalists. The agency publishes stories, photos and videos in six languages, namely Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

AFP isn’t the only news outlet that’s been attacked by hackers recently. At the end of May, the Polish state news agency PAP became the victim of a cyberattack. Employees noticed something was wrong when a false article about military mobilization appeared twice on its news feed. The government assumes that Russian-backed hackers were responsible for the attack.

A few weeks later, in June, The New York Times sent out a data breach notification letter to several freelancers, saying their information was involved in a security incident. According to Recorded Future News, the leak included a file that contained some personal information including names, phone numbers, email addresses, mailing address, nationality, biography, social media information and other data on specific assignments.